Authoritative Practices and Collective Validation: Wikidata within the Collaborative Digital Edition of the Greek Anthology

Maxime Guénette

Université de Montréal

Mathilde Verstraete

Université de Montréal

May 6, 2025

Introduction

  • Wikidata as an open infrastructure for DH knowledge representation
  • A decentralisation of authority

How, then, can expert-led projects work with a generalist platform such as Wikidata to generate new forms of knowledge?

How do these hybrid models — which combine scholarly expertise with public participation — challenge traditional boundaries between academic and amateur contributors, and between knowledge production and validation?

Overview

  • Wikidata as infrastructure in Digital Humanities
  • Case Study: Anthologia Graeca — corpus, platforms, data model (uses of Wikidata)
  • Focus: Representing the authors of the Greek Anthology through Wikidata
  • Some thoughts on authority and collective intelligence : digital infrastructures challenging and extending traditional scholarly practices.

Wikidata and Digital Humanities

  • Wikidata is a major knowledge graph for structuring and sharing data
  • DH projects use it to publish Linked Open Data without technical barriers
  • GLAM institutions rely on it for metadata curation and interoperability

Wikidata as A Linking Hub

Authority on Digital Platforms

A collaborative and digital edition of the Greek Anthology : https://anthologiagraeca.org/

  • Led by the Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities
  • Funded by the SSHRC ;
    • Insight Development (2017-2019)
    • Insight (2019-2025)
    • 2 Connections (2022, 2024)
  • Large and diverse team :
    • Researchers : M. Vitali-Rosati, E. Bouchard, C. Raschle
    • Coordinators : M. Verstraete, W. Bouchard
    • Developers : D. Larlet, S. Rubio, É. Guicherd
    • Editors & contributors from UdeM (Research assistants), Naples (University Students), Bari (High School students)…
    • Institutional partners: CRIHN, Perseus, Perseids, Heidelberg Library, etc.

Project’s corpus

  • Ancient Greek epigrams (6th c. BCE – 10th c. CE)
    • 15 centuries of literary production
  • Evolving corpus based on successive compilations
  • Core manuscripts:
    • Palatine Anthology (Heidelbergensis Pal. gr. 23, 10th c.)
    • +
    • Appendix Planudea (Marcianus gr. 481, 1299)
    • =
    • Greek Anthology
  • 4,134 epigrams by 311 authors

Project’s goals

  • A hub for the Greek Anthology : Manuscript, Texts Translations, Keywords, Commentaries, Internal and External References, …

A few words on the previous platforms

  • 1️⃣ SPIP prototype → indexing, first technical/epistemic tests
  • 2️⃣ Anthologia Palatina → contributor-facing platform
  • 3️⃣ Anthologia Graeca → full corpus, multilingual support, LOD + open API

Experimentation is part of the project

The platform’s keywords

CSV :

  • Author’s ID on our platform
  • Wikidata’s ID & URL
  • TLG’s ID & URL
  • Languages (latin, french, english, italian, ancient greek)
  • Action (Nothing, Delete, Create) to do on our platform

Some comments on the outcome and future work

Authors : Go further ? (floruit ?)

Cities : work in progress

  • ✅ Coordinates
  • ❌ Names in different languages

Other keywords : work in progress

Conclusion

  • Wikidata redefines academic authority through shared, community-driven knowledge.

  • It challenges scholars to balance openness with academic standards.

  • It surfaces tensions around validation and authorship in collaborative research.